Uzendoski, Michael A. & Edith FeliciaCalapucha-Tapuy2012 The Ecology of the Spoken Word:Amazonian Storytelling and Shamanismamong the Napo Runa. Urbana, IL : Universityof Illinois Press.

Notes: xiv, 245 pages : ill. ; ISBN 9780252036569

Reviewed 14 May 2012 by:Jack David Eller <david.eller@ccd.edu>Community College of Denver

Medium: Written Literature

SubjectKeywords:

Quechua mythology - Napo River Valley(Ecuador and Peru)Quechua Indians - Napo River Valley(Ecuador and Peru) - Songs and musicStorytelling - Napo River Valley (Ecuadorand Peru)Shamanism - Napo River Valley (Ecuadorand Peru)

ABSTRACT: Translations and discussions ofNapo Runa traditional and modern story and songillustrate the relationship between word, gesture,context, and cosmology, all of which do more thanconvey semantic meaning but establish andmaintain relationships and accomplishtransformations.

I was in the middle of teaching my Anthropologyof Religion course when The Ecology of theSpoken Word arrived. I had been trying to showstudents how anthropology emphasizes theperformative qualities, the cultural embeddednessand embodiedness, and the efficacy of ritual—including verbal ritual—and I was incredibly excitedto share this book with the students. Not sinceDennis Tedlock’s Finding the Center, publishedforty years ago, have I seen such an attempt torender the spoken and enacted quality of oralliterature, and Uzendoski’s book enjoys the addedadvantage of being able to refer to onlinerecordings and images of the material (seehttp://spokenwordecology.com/).

Via these multimedia resources, Uzendoski’s goalis to give “a theoretical and experiential translationof Napo Runa mythology and music” which entailstranslating “myths and songs so that readers canget a better appreciation for the beauty andcomplexity of Amazonian Quichua poeticexpressions” (p. 1). But as the author well knows,“words…are only a small part of a total storytellingreality” (p. 2), and finally the technology—and thetheory—are catching up with the ‘traditional’practice.

After a short but helpful introduction in which hecritiques the conventional treatment of oralliterature, citing Ruth Finnegan’s objection thatWestern observers and translators have used theirown culture’s “assumptions about communication(and specifically language) to construct ahegemonic complex that explains away much ofthe richness of other expressive systems asinferior” (p. 8), Uzendoski presents one of his mostimportant concepts—somatic poetry. The firstchapter explores this concept more deeply, definedas “multimodal art created by listening, feeling,smelling, seeing, and tasting of naturalsubjectivities, not just those emanating fromhuman speech or from the human mind” (p. 23).This is especially salient in the Amazonian contextbecause various scholars, most prominentlyEduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998), have arguedthat such cultures exhibit a kind of ‘perspectivism’in which many or all living things have their ownhuman-like perspectives or minds and speak withtheir own voices. In fact, Carlos Londono Sulkin(2005) has pushed the idea further, suggestingthat for the Muinane people ‘immoral’ behavior inhumans is actually a non-human (animal or plant)voice speaking in and through a human being. Inshort—and no doubt not only for Amazoniansocieties—bodies and places matter forunderstanding speech and action.

This first chapter also introduces the shamanic useof narratives such as ‘vapor poetry,’ related tokushnirina or “a medicinal vapor sweat bathdesigned to cure illness, cleanse the body, andgive strength” (p. 25). As anthropologists havecome to understand, shamanic (and other‘symbolic’) cures tend to involve transfers of powerand transformations of the patient’s mind andbody; in this case, the bath ritual “allows the healerto transfer the power of the plants into the body ofthe patient” (p. 28). The words and the non-verbalelements of somatic poetry then enable the

participants “to experience a samayinterconnectedness to the primordial forces,subjectivities, and myriad detailed and subtlequalities of place—a landscape inscribed with anddefined by unseen power” (p. 33).

Most of the subsequent chapters are translationsand explications of particular stories, for instancethe tale of the great flood in chapter two. Often weget more than one version of the narrative and,more importantly, various visual devices to conveysomething of the spoken quality, such as boldedletters and even marginal drawings of facial andmanual gestures employed by the speaker.Chapter three covers the stories of Iluku (anocturnal bird associated with the moon), the originof the sun, and an axis mundi that establishes the“relatedness among birds, people, rocks, rivers,the wind, the landscape, and various otherpresences [which] provides people with a deepemotional and social attachment to the ecologicalworld around them” (p. 59).

The fourth chapter deals with women’s songs thatagain display relationality and transformation,including “feminine shape-shifting relationsbetween birds and women, fish and women, andsimilar mimetic transformations in history” (p. 79).The fifth chapter narrates the tale of ‘The Twinsand the Jaguar,’ the central theme of which is“becoming a jaguar” (p. 101). Chapters six andseven continue the exposition of the ‘twins’ orCuillurguna, “Napo Quichua culture heroes andmythological ancestors of all living people” (p. 135)and, more crucially, “creative and artful worldmakers” (p. 136). The seventh chapter in particulartells the “final episode of the twins cycle” (p. 157)in which they ascend into the sky and relates thatstory to some local petroglyphs.

Interestingly, the final chapter turns tocontemporary Amazonian music, especially RunaPaju performances that feature “a montage oftraditional Quichua symbols and meaningsarticulated through the modernistic technologies ofvocal and instrumental amplification” (p. 172). Inthis practice, many dichotomies break down, suchas traditional and modern or Quichua and Spanish,although it still evinces many qualities of pre-modern narrative and song. For instance, the lyricsof Runa Paju songs “often invoke the ways ofspeaking of the elders; Runa Paju, in other words,is a new tradition that is creatively linked to thetraditions of the past” (p. 183). Even more, the

songs convey the “moving and dynamic imagery ofreversal and transformation” (p. 185) found intraditional oral literature. In the end, Uzendoskicalls this ‘cosmological communitas,’ “a ritualtransformation where cosmology is experiencedcollectively as a journey, and the cosmologicaljourneying elicited through Quichua musicdisplaces the master narratives of the nation-stateand modernity” (p. 193).

The Ecology of the Spoken Word is a fascinatingand successful study of an oral tradition, withimplications far beyond the Amazonian context.The translations and mythologies included in thebook will be of special interest to scholars ofAmazonian religion, but wider audiences shouldenjoy and benefit from the idea of somatic poetryand of the multimodal performance and relationalefficacy of song and story. It is finally clear that the‘meaning’ of a myth or song cannot be reduced toits semantics or to its grammar. The verbaldimension of a narrative performance is only oneaspect of a fuller mental, emotional, and visceralexperience.

Reference

Londona Sulkin, Carlos D. 2005 Inhuman Beings:Morality and Perspectivism among MuinanePeople (Colombian Amazon). Ethnos 70 (1): 7-30.

Tedlock, Dennis 1972 Finding the Center:Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians New York:TheDial Press.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 1998 CosmologicalDeixis and Amerindian Perspectivism. Journal ofthe Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s. 4 (3): 469-88.

To cite this review, the American Anthropological Associationrecommends the following style:

Eller, Jack David2012 Review of The Ecology of the SpokenWord: Amazonian Storytelling and Shamanismamong the Napo Runa. Anthropology ReviewDatabase May 14, 2012.http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=5127, accessed August 30, 2012.

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